In the previous (and my first) written attempt on this topic;
There are No Rights
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Jun 21
I claimed ‘rights’ is a postmodern fantasy. One evidence for this is every ancient text and scripture I know of. That point has not (essentially) changed.
Then I claimed that ‘rights’ don’t exist because every right or infraction of rights can already be handled with legal/moral terminology already in existence for millenia. That point has not changed (at all).
A subsequent point, that the Law/Justice is sufficient, and that ‘rights’ are illusory or superfluous; this will be thoroughly expanded herein.
TLDR1:
- Premise 1: Law is Truth, and Truth is Real.
- therefore, Law is Real.
- Observation: ‘Rights’ are not lawful/under The Law.
- therefore; ‘Rights’ are not Real.
- Conclusion (for now): ‘Rights’ are superfluous in society
- Seems true even in Western Christian nations. Therefore, forget about it!
One problem with the concept of rights is that it claims to be universally true. When we use traditional moral/legal language for the contemporary understanding and usage of ‘rights’ we immediately see that there are hardly any practical universals in humanity. Simply put, rights are not actually universal, as they are known and spoken of today.
If we all have ‘a right to speak freely’ and I censor someone else’s speech, what does that mean? From the contemporary ‘rights’ perspective, I ‘infringed on their rights’ and that is ‘bad’. In reality (and thus morality), one act of censorship can be good, and another act of censorship can be bad. Truly, it depends on circumstances. Uncensored/free speech is essentially the same. There is good free speech that promotes a better world, and bad free speech that promotes a worse world.
For several practical, contemporary and personal examples on this, check out this essay’s twin:
There are No Rights 1.2a
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Jul 9
One might think; ‘we are adults, we are mature, we can speak about many different topics without disturbing others’2. Why is there a need to talk about ‘a human right’ to speak freely, shouldn’t it be implied or common sense?
Actually and apparently, we can no longer assume or believe that most people will ‘mind their own business’ when another’s speech seems a bit too extreme or weird. People get unfairly ‘victimized’ for their speech every day in the Western and Eastern world. That’s why and how this ‘human rights’ idea came into existence. Early colonialists in North America had fled their homeland largely because of religious persecution (we are told at least). Religious persecution and free speech persecution were combined into a single human right (ammendment) in the U.S. Constitution.
What does it even mean to have ‘a right to speak freely’ or a ‘right to freely practice religion’?3
Surely we can all speak freely; that’s not a right, it’s a reality. If you have a mouth and a tongue and adequate mental health, you have the ability and priviledge to speak ‘freely’. However, the consequences of speech; that’s not up to any person, group, lawbook or government. That’s up to reality. That is karma, the law of causation.
Are rights any different than abilities or priviledges? No, not really it seems.
A right to free speech means the acknowledgement that others have the ability to speak freely, and also that the government can not involve itself (by force) with consequences of that free speech. That’s literally the only difference between living in a country ‘with no human rights’ and a country ‘with human rights’. In a country with no human rights, people are still speaking freely every day. But maybe one day, they cross the line (of the status quo), and the government punishes them for it. In a country with human rights, people can speak freely, even negatively about their own government, and they don’t need to worry about the government doing anything violent/forceful towards them.
Right? No. In reality, no. People are punished and jailed for free speech all the time in ‘human rights countries’. So what does it even mean? It means nothing.
Major Claim 1;
‘Rights’ are not Real
There are no rights because what we call rights are not real. It may be a thing we can talk about and utilize, especially in a legal court, but it does not come from the category of reality, it comes from the category of the mind. The same is true of concepts like race and racism. ‘Race’ is technically not real. Ethnicity and nationality on the other hand; these are terms for things that do exist in reality4. Terms like ‘white people’ and ‘black people’ are mutable and don’t have a 1-to-1 correspondence with reality. I’ve met some South Koreans who are whiter than me. Are they white people, or not white people, or ‘more white’ than me? It’s an excellent question, because the concept of race is absurd de jure (essentially and categorically). ‘(Human) Rights’ is a worse term because it is absurd de jure and de facto (seen in the visible world, empirically).
In plainer English, human rights is a fantasy.
There is a similar thing that we really want to have in our lives. This is what we think we are talking about when we use terms like ‘human rights’ and ‘equality’ and ‘social justice’ today. It is literally and technically called ‘The Law’. Other similar words in plain English include; order, justice, the truth, stability, security, eternality, fairness, etc. There is a large degree of variance in subtlety and subjectivity in these words unfortunately.
We can measure the justice of one act of petty theft that’s recorded on a video camera with much precision. On the other hand, if we want to measure the fairness of someone receiving a promotion in an office, it may be virtually/practically impossible. Even with the entire back story of everyone involved, all the reasons for and against the promotion from everyone, we can not measure the fairness of that act with precision. Fairness is more subjective. Maybe it’s fair for most people involved, but one person who is not even in the same department thinks it is unfair enough that they choose to leave the company. Or maybe there’s just too much difference on what ‘fairness of a promotion’ means conceptually among the people centrally involved.
This is a problem that needs a technical solution. That solution, once again, is The Law. Not only ‘The Law’ of course. There are other things like God and Love, those work well too.
By ‘The Law’ of course we don’t mean laws. Just like by ‘God’ we don’t mean gods. Singular vs. plural is radically significant for words like law and god. More humorously but still very true, by ‘Love’ we mean unconditional love, we do not mean sexual intercourse for physical pleasure.
Did y’all contemporary English speakers ever stop to think that when we say “the law” we are talking about one thing? One law5? I didn’t. I never thought about this until studying law proper and ‘natural law’ in my 30s.
Major Claim 2;
‘Rights’ are not under Law
Even if human rights were real, they would not be on the same ground as Law. The most obvious and mundane example is the U.S. Constitution. The Bill of Rights6 was added several years after the original Constitution was signed. Clearly, there were more important concerns for the founding fathers of the U.S.A. This isn’t sarcasm; these men were the very best of their time, sometimes in multiple fields simultaneously (e.g. B. Franklin).
For any written law to be properly understood and practiced under The Law, it must at least propose to be universally and eternally true. As soon as people divided rights into subcategories (human, animal, women, skin color, etc.) they admitted that the concept of rights is a sham7. When one group has more or less rights than another, that is clearly unjust. It doesn’t matter if that group’s rights are de facto/de jure more or less. That is simply against The Law.
However, to say one group has different characteristics than another group is Natural8 and acceptable. To go so radically further9 and claim that different groups may be treated differently according to their different characteristics is also Natural and (de jure) acceptable.
Groups are essentially not different than individuals. Just as we treat individual people benelovent to us differently than those who mean us harm, we naturally apply this mentality to groups too. Are there mistakes in these calculations and practices? Of course, even at the individual level mistakes are found everywhere all the time.
Most importantly, what Law is being broken here? None that I can think of. In fact, the Law of Identity10 is being upheld and defended. To claim equality among items or groups that are unequal (de facto or de jure) is to violate the law of identity. This also violates the Ethos Maxim; a clarification/expansion of The Golden Rule that I coined here;
The Golden Rule 1.2
·
Jun 21
We’ve all heard of the golden rule, and it may seem difficult to refute, but there are actually some problems with the golden rule…
Click to read the full essay on the Ethos Maxim.
Major Claim 3;
‘Rights’ are Superfluous in Society
This was already claimed in the first essay. Exapnding as little as possible here.
Even if rights were real and lawful, we don’t need them. We don’t need them to be studied or written down anywhere. However, at an individual level, the practice of what we call rights is an excellent thing that could continue and expand. When we meet someone who is in a state of constant and successful practice of their rights to free speech, self-defense, and so on, how do they act? Do they whine or boast? No. Do they claim that they have those rights and exercise them because it was written down on a legal document somewhere? No. Those rights are in fact priviledges, abilities and states of character. They aren’t rights; they are a component part of ethos.
Premise 1;
Law is Truth, and Truth is Real.
It must be true that law is truth, from a practical standpoint. If there is no law that we can practically say is True, then we are de facto lawless beings. Every attempt at Order in our individual lives and collective society would be technically pointless/useless. We must premise that (some kind of) law must be true, in order to simply live day by day with some semblance/inkling of sanity, stability or happiness.
This argument/logic follows essentially the same flow and purpose as the argument for God’s existence called Pascal’s wager. The purpose is not to prove through logic that God does exist, or that law is real; the purpose is to assert that we do not need to prove something so obvious and/or pointless. That is, if it is genuinely not true that God exists, then it doesn’t matter. Everyone can just have fun and do whatever they want, who cares. If it is genuinely true that law is not real, that it is entirely arbitrary, then why talk about? Why bother following the law? Furthermore, it’s not merely the same kind of argument in theory. In reality, the consequences are virtually identical. A godless society is the same as a lawless society11.
Therefore;
Law is Real
It seems law also must come from Reality12, and nowhere else. A transcendent reality (God, the monad, Brahman, etc.) could be the only exception. When any person or group writes down something they call ‘law’, it does not necessarily mean it is Law. Most of what we call laws in English are actually rules. Surely, we should follow these rules that are codified in lawbooks and enforced by government agents, but the vast majority of these rules and statutes are not laws, and definitely not (the) Law. If a law is true one day, and not another day, it can not be Law. If a law is true for one group of people, but not another group of people, it can not be Law. If you can vote something into existence, and then vote it out of existence, sorry folks, that’s not Law. These are rules because they are arbitrary and often require interpretation. Law can not be arbitrary. If a law requires interpretation, it is not really Law; though it may be an attempt at expressing Law.
Closing Thoughts
One meme-worthy summary of this topic is a quote from a friend I talked to while writing this essay. He said,
“We have rights on this planet, but not in this universe.” – A.G. 7/15/26
Regarding first principles, I am satisfied with this second essay on this topic. I would love to see anyone use logic to disprove any of the major claims or premises in this essay.
Regarding Reality, with a particular concern for contemporary Western society, I am not satisfied with this second essay. I am still scratching my head to figure out how to express this knowledge to others so that it makes a substantial difference in worldview and culture.
A summary from ‘There are No Rights’ (1.0) is;
“…there are no rights. There are people. People can act virtuously or viciously, with divinity or evil. That’s all folks.”
A summary from ‘There are No Rights’ (1.2) is;
There is Law and Freedom. Follow the Law to gain Freedom. Use Freedom to defend and cultivate the Law. #SpinTheWheelofDharma
‘Rights’ is an attempt to acquire/use/benefit from Law without correct/excellent use of Freedom (moral actions in Reality).
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Too Long, Didn’t Read. Or in plain English, a summary.
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” – Aristotle
Seriously; I’m asking You the reader, it is not rhetorical.
When I say I’m a European blooded American, that is an objective fact. When I say I’m a white person, that’s up to you if you think it’s true or not. I think it’s objectively false, because a person can not be a color. Only the physical body can have color.
There seems to be One Right, connected to the One Law. The One Right has nothing to do with any creature. It has to do with action and purpose. BG 2.47
‘Rights’ allegedly, but only for ‘humans’ and not even all humans. Women, children and ‘negroes’ were added much later as ‘officially equal under the law’ (whatever that means in reality, I don’t know).
Perhaps rights is not merely false/illusory, it may really be a mockery/subversion of the law.
This is capitalized on purpose. Nature in this sense is ‘the Mother of the Law’. And, ‘the Parent of Nature’ is God.
Now, I am being sarcastic.
X = X, Y = Y, so X ≠ Y.
By logic, a minor claim. In many societies today, a major claim.
Emphasized to differentiate between similar sounding words like ‘society’ and ‘the world’ that are essentially different. Modern people who live mostly in society are not living in reality. That’s why we’re here; me writing this and you reading this; we are mostly insane now (collectively).